Gaia in Turmoil PDF Download

Author: Eileen Crist
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262033755
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 782

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Book Description
Essays link Gaian science to such global environmental quandaries as climate change and biodiversity destruction, providing perspectives from science, philosophy, politics, and technology.

Author: Tyler Volk
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1461221900
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
If the biosphere really is a single coherent system, then it must have something like a physiology. It must have systems and processes that perform living functions. In Gaia's Body, Tyler Volk describes the environment that enables the biosphere to exist, various ways of looking at its "anatomy" and "physiology", the major biogeographical regions such as rainforests, deserts, and tundra, the major substances the biosphere is made of, and the chemical cycles that keep it in balance. He then looks at the question of whether there are any long-term trends in the earth's evolution, and examines the role of humanity in Gaia's past and future. Both adherents and sceptics have often been concerned that Gaia theory contains too much goddess and too few verifiable hypotheses. This is the book that describes, for scientists, students, and lay readers alike, the theory's firm basis in science.

Author: Michael Ruse
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022606039X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
“The book is full of empathetic, insightful, and often very funny portraits of Margulis, Lovelock, and a community of other figures associated with Gaia.” —Carla Nappi, New Books in Science, Technology, and Society In 1965 English scientist James Lovelock had a flash of insight: the Earth is not just teeming with life; the Earth, in some sense, is life. He mulled this revolutionary idea over for several years, first with his close friend the novelist William Golding, and then in an extensive collaboration with the American scientist Lynn Margulis. In the early 1970s, he finally went public with the Gaia hypothesis, the idea that everything happens for an end: the good of planet Earth. Lovelock and Margulis were scorned by professional scientists, but the general public enthusiastically embraced Lovelock and his hypothesis. In The Gaia Hypothesis, philosopher Michael Ruse, with his characteristic clarity and wit, uses Gaia and its history, its supporters and detractors, to illuminate the nature of science itself. Gaia emerged in the 1960s, a decade when authority was questioned and status and dignity stood for nothing, but its story is much older. Ruse traces Gaia’s connection to Plato and a long history of goal-directed and holistic—or organicist—thinking and explains why Lovelock and Margulis’s peers rejected it as pseudoscience. But Ruse also shows why the project was a success. He argues that Lovelock and Margulis should be commended for giving philosophy firm scientific basis and for provoking important scientific discussion about the world as a whole, its homeostasis or—in this age of global environmental uncertainty—its lack thereof. “[Ruse’s] treatment is thought-provoking and original, as you would expect from this perceptive, irrepressible philosopher of biology.” —New Scientist

Author: Jude Currivan
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1644115328
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 418

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Book Description
Explores how the Universe, our planet, ourselves, and everything in existence has inherent meaning and evolutionary purpose • 2023 Nautilus Gold Award • Examines our emergence as self-aware members of a Universe that is itself a unified and innately sentient entity that exists TO evolve • Shares leading-edge scientific breakthroughs and shows how they support traditional visions of Earth as a living being--Gaia • Rewrites evolution as not driven by random occurrences and mutations but by intelligently informed and meaningful information flows and processes Exploring our emergence as self-aware members of a planetary home and entire Universe that is a unified and innately sentient entity, Jude Currivan, Ph.D., shows that mind and consciousness are not what we possess but what we and the whole world fundamentally are. She reveals our Universe as “a great thought of cosmic mind,” manifesting as a cosmic hologram of meaningful in-formation that, vitally, exists to evolve. Sharing scientific breakthroughs, the author details the 13.8 billion-year story of our Universe and Gaia, where everything in existence has inherent meaning and evolutionary purpose. Showing how the Universe was born, not in an implicitly chaotic big bang, but as the first moment of a fine-tuned and ongoing “big breath,” she shares the latest evidence for the innate sentience that has guided our universal journey from simplicity to ever-greater complexity, diversity, and self-awareness--from protons to planets, plants, and people. She explains how evolution is not driven by random occurrences and mutations but by profoundly resonant and harmonic interplays of forces and influences, each intelligently informed and guided. In Gaia, the Universe’s evolutionary impulse is embodied in collaborative relationships and dynamic co-evolutionary partnerships on a planetary scale and as a wholistic gaiasphere. She reveals how the conscious evolution of humanity is an integral part of Gaia’s own evolutionary progress and purpose. By perceiving and experiencing our planet as a sentient being and ourselves as Gaians, we open ourselves to a deeply ecological, evolutionary, and, above all, hopeful worldview.

Author: Jeffery T. Morris
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739170554
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
Risk, Language, and Power explores discourse around the environmental risks of nanotechnology, making the case that the dominance in risk discourse of regulatory science is a limiting policy debate on environmental risks, and that specific initiatives should be undertaken to broaden debate not just on nanotechnology, but generally on the risks of new technologies. Morris argues that the treatment of environmental risk in public policy debates has failed for industrial chemicals, is failing for nanotechnology, and most certainly will fail for synthetic biology and other new technologies unless we change how we describe the impacts to people and other living things from the development and deployment of technology. However, Morris also contends that the nanotechnology case provides reason for optimism that risk can be given different, and better, treatment in environmental policy debates. Risk, Language, and Power proposes specific policy initiatives to advance a richer discourse around the environmental implications of emerging technologies. Morris believes that evidence of enriched environmental policy debates would be a decentering of language concerning risk by developing within discourse language and practice directed toward enriching the human and environmental condition.

Author: Mohammad Shamsudduha
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 1351352253
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 110

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Book Description
Gaia: A New Look At Life on Earth may continue to divide opinion, but nobody can deny that the book offers a powerful insight into the creative thinking of its author, James E. Lovelock. Published in 1979, Gaia offered a radically new hypothesis: the Earth, Lovelock argued, is a living entity. Together, the planet and all its separate living organisms form a single self-regulating body, sustaining life and helping it evolve through time. Lovelock sees humans as no more special than other elements of the planet, railing against the once widely-held belief that the good of mankind is the only thing that matters. Despite being seen as radical, and even idiotic on its publication, a version of Lovelock’s viewpoint has found resonance in contemporary debates about the environment and climate, and has now broadly come to be accepted by modern thinkers. As man’s effects on the climate become increasingly extreme, more and more elements of the Earth’s self-regulation seem to be unveiled – forcing scientists to ask how far the planet might be able to go in order self-regulate effectively. Indeed, despite its far-fetched elements, Lovelock’s Gaia thesis seems to ring more convincingly today than ever before; that it does is largely a result of the critical thinking skills that allowed Lovelock to produce novel explanations for existing evidence and, above all, to connect existing fragments of evidence together in new ways.

Author: Noel Castree
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317275888
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 848

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Book Description
Companion to Environmental Studies presents a comprehensive and interdisciplinary overview of the key issues, debates, concepts, approaches and questions that together define environmental studies today. The intellectually wide-ranging volume covers approaches in environmental science all the way through to humanistic and post-natural perspectives on the biophysical world. Though many academic disciplines have incorporated studying the environment as part of their curriculum, only in recent years has it become central to the social sciences and humanities rather than mainly the geosciences. ‘The environment’ is now a keyword in everything from fisheries science to international relations to philosophical ethics to cultural studies. The Companion brings these subject areas, and their distinctive perspectives and contributions, together in one accessible volume. Over 150 short chapters written by leading international experts provide concise, authoritative and easy-to-use summaries of all the major and emerging topics dominating the field, while the seven part introductions situate and provide context for section entries. A gateway to deeper understanding is provided via further reading and links to online resources. Companion to Environmental Studies offers an essential one-stop reference to university students, academics, policy makers and others keenly interested in ‘the environmental question’, the answer to which will define the coming century.

Author: Anaïs Augé
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000892271
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Book Description
This volume sheds light on the argumentative role of metaphor in climate change discourse, unpacking the ways in which stakeholders use specific metaphors to influence perceptions of the climate crisis. While existing research has explored the explanatory function of metaphors in communication on climate change, this book offers an alternative view, one which posits that metaphors can go beyond disseminating scientific observations to promoting biases in the depiction of these observations. Augé analyses oft-used ideas in climate change communication, such as greenwashing, drawn from a wide-ranging corpus spanning media discourse, scientific discourse, NGO communications, political speech, and social media messages in English. The book presents an overview of different arguments conveyed through metaphors around five key themes—climate change mitigation; the evolution of climate change; global and local effects; the significance of climate change in specific countries; and the relationship between climate change and other contemporary social issues. The volume highlights how the complexity of climate change often necessitates the use of metaphor and the value of further research on the argumentative function of metaphor in elucidating its ideological dimensions in climate crisis discourse. This book will be of interest to scholars in discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, cognitive linguistics, and environmental communication.

Author: Jeremy D. Fackenthal
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498595111
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 199

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Book Description
This book examines how the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, a speculative philosopher from the first half of the twentieth century, converses and entangles itself with continental philosophers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries around the question of a sustainable civilization in the present. Chapters are focused around economic and environmental sustainability, questions of how technology and systems relate to this sustainability, relationships between human and nonhuman entities, relationships among humans, and how larger philosophical questions lead one to think differently about what the terms sustainable and civilization mean. The book aims to uncover and explore ways in which the combination of these philosophies might provide the “dislocations” within thought that lead to novel ways of being and acting in the world.

Author: Cas Mudde
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 150953685X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 129

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Book Description
The far right is back with a vengeance. After several decades at the political margins, far-right politics has again taken center stage. Three of the world’s largest democracies – Brazil, India, and the United States – now have a radical right leader, while far-right parties continue to increase their profile and support within Europe. In this timely book, leading global expert on political extremism Cas Mudde provides a concise overview of the fourth wave of postwar far-right politics, exploring its history, ideology, organization, causes, and consequences, as well as the responses available to civil society, party, and state actors to challenge its ideas and influence. What defines this current far-right renaissance, Mudde argues, is its mainstreaming and normalization within the contemporary political landscape. Challenging orthodox thinking on the relationship between conventional and far-right politics, Mudde offers a complex and insightful picture of one of the key political challenges of our time.